Medicine Quotes

I was not long since in a company where I was not who of my fraternity brought news of a kind of pills, by true account, composed of a hundred and odd several ingredients; whereat we laughed very heartily, and made ourselves good sport; for what rock so hard were able to resist the shock or withstand the force of so thick and numerous a battery?

Michel de Montaigne

Medicine makes people ill, mathematics makes them sad, and theology makes them sinful

Martin Luther King Jr.

I am dying from the treatment of too many physicians.

Alexander the Great

I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don't read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent solider is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

Christopher Hitchens

By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death will seize the doctor too.

William Shakespeare

To live by medicine is to live horribly.

Carolus Linnaeus

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

William Osler

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.

William Osler

The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.

Isak Dinesen

He who lives by medical prescriptions lives miserably.

Proverb

Quackery has no friend like gullibility.

Proverb

Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

Ivan Illich

My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today's medicine is at the end of its road. It can no longer be transformed, modified, readjusted. That's been tried too often. Today's medicine must DIE in order to be reborn. We must prepare its complete renovation.

Maurice Delort

Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It is medicine, not scenery, for which a sick man must go searching.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

Like a celestial chaperon, the placebo leads us through the uncharted passageways of mind and gives us a greater sense of infinity than if we were to spend all our days with our eyes hypnotically glued to the giant telescope at Mt. Palomar. What we see ultimately is that the placebo isn't really necessary and that the mind can carry out its difficult and wondrous missions unprompted by little pills. The placebo is only a tangible object made essential in an age that feels uncomfortable with intangibles, an age that prefers to think that every inner effect must have an outer cause. Since it has size and shape and can be hand-held, the placebo satisfies the contemporary craving for visible mechanisms and visible answers . The placebo, then, is an emissary between the will to live and the body.

Norman Cousins

In the words of the philosopher Scepturn, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?

Terry Pratchett

In medicine sins of commission are mortal, sins of omission are venial.

Theodore Tronchin

There are some remedies worse than the disease.

Publilius Syrus